When you're talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don't like to be treated poorly.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.
Isn't package.json for controlling what dependency versions people install with?
I think I'm missing something.
Yes, and I have a package.json that lists dependencies and the versions I test with. You can force a different version though. I don’t think that’s what happened here. I’m guessing it’s a version of some dependency that should work, because it was released as a minor version within the range I specified, but doesn’t actually work.
It could also be an issue with the build system/bundler, which I can’t really control either.
Yeah JavaScript is a horrible language and ecosystem in a lot of ways, but package.json and friends don't really give me much trouble.
And even if you hose something, you should be able to clear it out and reinstall easily.
I'm assuming the maintainer didn't (knowingly) make a breaking change in a minor/patch release. That's a high crime.
It's way worse on C and it's family. I still have nightmares with undocumented embedded dependencies that are so intertwined with the codebase that make JS look like a godsend.